Vietic and Early Chinese Grammatical Vocabulary in Vietnamese: Native Vietic and Austroasiatic Etyma versus Early Chinese Loanwords

In this talk, I present Vietnamese, Vietic, and Old and Middle Chinese lexical data with a focus on function words. The data consists of (a) about 60 Vietic reconstructions and (b) about 60 early Chinese loanwords in Vietnamese (i.e. those borrowed prior to Late Middle Chinese and the speciation of Viet-Muong). Core Vietic function words have been retained in Vietnamese (e.g., pronouns, numbers, location words, etc.), while Sinitic contributed words with other structural functions (comparative words, conjunctions, measures, etc.). This data has ethnohistorical linguistic implications for Vietic before and after language contact with Sinitic.